Requirements

Speculator should easily work on any operating system recently updated. We tested it mainly on Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, and 20.04.

At the moment the only hard requirement is cmake >= 3.1.

The following packages needs to be installed:

sudo apt install libjson-c-dev
sudo apt install libpfm4-dev  
sudo apt install ninja-build (optional)  
sudo apt install python-sqlalchemy  
sudo apt install cmake  
sudo apt install nasm  

Other two hard requirements for speculator to work properly are:

1. The system should be booted without Secure Boot

If you receive "Impossible to write IA32_PERF_GLOBAL_CTL" and dmesg reports "Lockdown: speculator_mon: raw MSR access is restricted; see man kernel_lockdown.7" this means you are running your system with Secure Boot enabled. Given that there are no lockdown bypass techniques available anymore, it is required to reboot the system and disable Secure Boot to prevent the automatic kernel lockdown at boot.

2. The msr kernel module should be loaded:

sudo modprobe msr